Kerala's Pulluvas and Pampum Tullal

Kerala's Pu??uvas and P?mpum Tu??al is a story about the lives of Kerala's Pu??uva ritual specialists and their days-long ritual performance, p?mpum tu??al, or the "jumping dance" of the serpent deities (n?gam or p?mpu). The ritual is commissioned by members of Kerala's landed communities to bring health and prosperity to their extended families. Belonging to an ancient South Indian tradition, the ritual is orchestrated by Pu??uva ritual specialists, who hold the sole hereditary right to perform it. This book is the first in Kerala to approach this ritual tradition from the viewpoints and agency of its Dalit (formerly known as 'untouchable') ritual specialists-men and women, and to examine Pu??uva ritual practice in the context of rapid and extensive social change. The study sheds important light upon Pu??uva rituals, lives, and livelihoods, within the broader contexts of changing class, caste, and kinship relations; land tenure and ritual patronage; labour migration; and the decline of N?yar matrilineality and old landed families. These wide-ranging social trends, indexed and acted out in ritual, are the backdrop for understanding Pu??uva ritual practice from the 1980s, and in terms of history, point to multiple structures and hierarchies of practice and meaning.